Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Upgrading PeopleTools with Zero Downtime (3/3)

In the past post, we covered the approach we followed to have both PeopleTools versions running at once. In this post we will cover the issues we faced and how we got around.

Missing Tables

Our approach for identifying tables was not perfect. By examining the traces and logs, we missed some tables that were directly impacted by Application Designer (we did not enable tracing while copying the PeopleTools projects as it would have taken too much time to complete, so we did not have those tables in our lists). Fortunately enough, we only had to adjust the list of tables a couple of times and we were up and running.

Sequences

For performance reasons, the customer had created Oracle Sequences instead of using the PeopleTools auto-numbering approach. In order to have the sequences in sync between both databases we followed the same approach we applied to the tables, deleting one of the sequences and creating a synonym pointing to the sequence in the other instance.

Performance

Most of the performance in running SQL statements is impacted by how the database builds the execution plans. The execution plans are generated taking into account the database statistics. When using DB Links, the database on which the SQL sentence is executed does not have statistics information of the linked tables, so the execution plan may not be optimal. This is particularly true for mixed queries involving local and linked tables.

During our testing, we identified a few performance issues which required to make the table physically present in both environments. This was not always possible, but for tables that are quite unlikely to change (for instance Business Unit options), it was definitely an option.

Data Types

Some of the data types used by PeopleTools changed from one release to the other. In our case, both timestamps and memo fields (LONG to CLOBS) had changed types. If the table is linked, only one of the data types could be used. In this sense, we were fortunate, as the data types used by the target PeopleTools release worked correctly in the previous release, so we could use the new ones.

Commit

In earlier releases of the Oracle Database, each insert/update/delete operation done against a DB Link table would commit immediately (and implicitly). This would pose a serious integrity issue. Luckily, both the source and the target database releases supported global transactions (which means that the data is committed when the system explicitly calls the commit command).

Conclusions

In the end, our attempt was successful. However, as you can see from the issues we faced, it cannot be concluded that it will work for all types of PeopleTools upgrades nor for certain customer requirements. Still, I thought it was a creative approach and that's why I decided to share it in this blog.